As consumer electronic products tend to be generally digitized, more and more digital entertainment devices and household appliances appear in homes. It is a concept of a digital home network being conceived and realized in the industry to connect these home network devices into a home network in a wired or wireless manner, so as to implement functions such as content sharing or mutual control.
A Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol is capable of implementing control over devices in a home network and interconnection among the devices in the home network. The UPnP defines a remote access mechanism, so as to implement UPnP communication between two different networks. For example, a remote network accesses device in a home network, and in the remote access mechanism of the UPnP, the remote network and the home network perform control and communication through the UPnP protocol.
In the implementation of the present invention, the inventor finds that the following problems exist when the remote network accesses the home network using the UPnP protocol.
When private addresses of devices in two local area networks performing communication using the UPnP protocol are in conflict, for example, when both the remote network and the home network are local area networks, and a certain device in the home network and a device in the remote network use the same private IP address, address conflict occurs. At this time, the two local area networks cannot conduct communication.